In the News

The cloud has a way of hiding much of what we used to fret about. Servers are boxes, and boxes are meant to be interchangeable. You push the button and you log in. It's just a box, and there's no need to spend much time thinking about it because it's a commodity.

SoftLayer is one of the companies fighting the commodification of the servers, at least a bit. SoftLayer is still selling servers by the hour and offering a cloud of machines that starts up on demand, but it's also making the server purchase more like it used to be. You have plenty of options, some of which include getting a raw machine that's yours, all yours.

TheServerSide had an interesting conversation with the field marketing folks working for 10gen, the people behind MongoDB... not completely unbiased when it comes to the world of data persistence, but her insights into what was going on over at Craigslist with regards to their big-data problem was interesting, to say the least.

TheServerSide had an interesting conversation with Samantha Kosko a little while ago. She's one of the field marketing folks working for 10gen, the people behind MongoDB, so she's not completely unbiased when it comes to the world of data persistence, but her insights into what was going on over at Craigslist with regards to their big-data problem was interesting, to say the least.

Mainstream IT skills are still very much in demand in 2013, according to new research, but if you want to make yourself even more employable, it won't hurt to brush up on your big-data expertise. According UK government body E-skills, the top technical skills demanded by employers over the past year include classics such as Windows, SQL, .Net, C#, Java, Oracle, JavaScript and HTML. Skills around MongoDB, a scalable open-source NoSQL database, are also becoming more desirable.

Here are some specific trends we will see in the coming year in relation to cloud computing and data management.

Enterprises Embrace Distributed and Decentralized Approaches: To counter this infrastructure build-out and find new ways to implement big data, nascent distributed and decentralized models will gain broader acceptance in 2013. Part of this movement will also be driven by an attempt by companies to be more “green,” to better utilize existing infrastructure and, perhaps most importantly, to achieve higher global resiliency. Enterprises will look beyond just virtualization and embrace solutions that enable parallel processing, distributed databases, agile storage and highly scalable architectures. The big winners here will be the Hadoop ecosystem, Mongo DB and other open-source NoSQL databases, and OpenStack and other community open cloud platforms, such as Eucalyptus. Companies will also invest more in colocation facilities, such as Savvis or Switch, rather than building own their own data centers, even when implementing private-cloud solutions.